Out in the badlands of New Mexido where the tumbleweeds blow, Tier 1 POPs are nowhere to be seen. I get long-hauled to a different state just for an Internet T1 from UUNET. Unfortunately, Albuquerque is an important business hub in my company, and we have several locations in NM & CO. But the rest are on the east coast and down south. A couple of pictures tell the story: http://www.swcp.com/pcaskey/tmp/NANOG.html I generally get good service with all my sites having UUNET connections, but it's kind of a bummer being routed through Los Angeles just to get to San Antonio. In fact, I'd be happy to buy a point-point line to the east, perhaps to my locations in D.C. or Research Triangle, if I could get any kind of decent latency guarantee. Then set up GRE tunnels to control traffic flow. Or maybe I could stay on the Internet, if a route could be found that would drift generally eastward, instead of going west and almost doubling the geographic distance. Offers and suggestions welcome. I'm at NANOG 27 in Phoenix right now. So far, the best theories involve some type of Sprint connection to Dallas / Fort Worth, because Sprint seems to have that path figured out better than UUNET. Then cross to UUNET on the private exchange in FtWorth. The latency through that exchange appears quite favorable. There'd be some addressing and routing issues to work out. My company does have an AS number, but we're not multi-homed, yet. I need to keep my UUNET line(s), so I'm looking for an addition, not a replacement. I would have to laugh if I could get to UUNET faster over Sprint than over UUNET. But that may be the way things are in the Wild West. TIA for any insights, and of course I'll summarize what I learn. -- Paul Caskey Albuquerque, NM, USA Information System Architect pcaskey@swcp.com -------------------------------------------------------------------- "You're basically killing each other to see who's got the better imaginary friend." --Rich Jeni, on war over religion